Newspapers want to come in from the cold
Dominic Mills (Chair), Jim Stevenson, Sue Unerman, James Wildman and Lewis Shaw
Do media planners suffer from ‘printism’ – a bias, or discrimination against, newspapers?
The upset to established media over the last twenty years has certainly shaken the newspaper market to its core, and in the words of Trinity Mirror Solutions’ James Wildman: “print is now seen as slightly unsexy.”
With so many digital channels to choose from, the rise of data-led marketing and changing consumer media habits, those in the business feel it’s time to reposition print and show-off its “clear and inherent” strengths, to use Wildman’s wording.
The problems are well established. Newspaper markets are in decline and with them ad revenues. The latest grim reading from the AA/Warc UK Expenditure Report shows that ad revenues for newsbrands fell 11% to £1.2bn in 2015, £150m lower than a year earlier owing entirely to losses in print business.
And although the longer-term picture painted by Warc is less severe than many realise, the short-term sense is that print is a dying medium – hence the ‘unsexiness’.
Watching the New Day last only nine weeks in print did not help matters.
Yet the entire national newspaper market – including the Sunday titles – has a circulation well above 14.3 million. Trinity Mirror, since buying Local World, owns more than 150 regional publications, including Manchester Evening News, Liverpool Echo and the Nottingham Post.
Now, re-establishing print as a viable advertising medium has got the likes of Wildman and his team at Trinity Mirror on a mission. The publisher has spent the last few months conducting research with agency planning teams and the early indication – the results will formally be released later this month – is that digital has, unsurprisingly, taken centre-stage and “left print in the cold.”
“The results show that the focus is moving inextricably towards digital,” Wildman said during a Mediatel and Trinity Mirror event to debate the issues.
“There’s a huge learning curve for a lot of people in agencies and the focus of conversations with advertisers tends to be about digital and not print. It’s all about measureability, programmatic, viewability.
“We’re seeing what we’ve coined ‘printism’: bias, partiality, unreasoned dislike, hostility or antagonism towards, or discrimination against, print.”
Yet the results of the research also show that almost three-quarters of planners remain committed to keeping print on their schedules, suggesting there is still enough interest to turn things around; and with issues such as ad-blocking and ad fraud dominating the digital debate, perhaps now is the best time to pounce.
James Wildman interview: Planning without ‘printism’
Jim Stevenson, a digital transformation consultant, says he sees elements of printism in media planning – but for him the problem is linked to data.
“It’s the underlying fact,” he says. “The data isn’t there. I want to know exactly what is happening. I don’t want averages.”
For those clients reaping the business benefits of performance marketing – whereby advertisers only pay when the results can be measured – print looks like an increasingly hard choice to justify, Stevenson suggests.
Elsewhere, and despite singing the praises of print in terms of superior journalism and influence, as well as its ability to drive quality metrics, Sue Unerman, chief strategy officer at MediaCom agrees.
“The data for print is inadequate and has been since forever,” she says.
“And what we’re seeing now [in terms of reduced adspend] is a redressing of over-spend in the past because there is better data available for other media.
“If I buy an ad in the Sunday Times business supplement, I don’t know how many people have seen it. And the reason the industry has not moved to address this issue in the past is because it hasn’t needed to. Now it does.”
The accusation that planners are ‘printist’, was flatly denied by Unerman, however – who made it clear that at MediaCom planning teams are intructed to work purely on evidence.
“We’re no more ‘printist’ than anything else-ist,” she says.
Sue Unerman interview: A new ‘shared risk, shared reward’ model for publishers
Wildman’s response to these remarks is to look towards PAMCo, the new audience measurement body and NRS replacement.
Next year PAMCo will launch its Audience Measurement for Publishers (AMP) to finally show overall de-duplicated reach of publisher brands across print, PC, mobile and tablet.
Likewise, the marketing body for newsbrands, Newsworks, is set to release its first ever effectiveness study this summer. The project will join a host of other research papers designed to prove that print remains a strong advertising medium that the body has produced since its revamp in 2012.
Speaking to those in attendance during the debate, there was an appreciation that publishers were willing to listen, learn and adapt. And as newspapers seek to come in from the cold, they will be warmed by the fact that there remain strong sentiments towards print.
“Newspapers are still making TV shows successful; they’re driving the agenda of Downing Street and Westminster,” says Unerman. “The strength of journalism is as great as it ever was and that generates a level of influence for advertising in newspapers.”
Lewis Shaw, head of investment at Manning Gottlieb OMD, says printed papers offer something no other media can, particularly in an age of distraction:
“There is so much that is great value. The engagement, the lack of interruption,” he said.
“The best part of my day is the twenty minutes in the morning I spend reading my paper.”
The client view is similar. Nick Ashworth, media agency manager at DFS Furniture, says that from an econometric point of view, print is still delivering “very strongly for our business, which is why we’ll continue to invest in the medium.
“Certainly there are concerns about declining numbers, but it is still a very powerful medium.”